Philip Stern is Assistant Professor of History and, beginning Fall 2011, Co-director of the BorderWork(s) Humanities Lab at the FHI. His work focuses on the history of Britain and the British Empire, particularly in the early modern period (loosely defined). His book The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and The Early Modern Origins of the British Empire in India (Oxford UP, 2011) – which in its manuscript stage was supported by an FHI Faculty Book MS Workshop – is a political and intellectual history of the English East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is also working on or planning projects related to the history of eighteenth-century British overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, and the history of companies and colonization.